Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday February 28, 2008 @02:14PM
from the you-scratch-my-back dept.

bfwebster writes "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."

As someone who doesn't like Microsoft software and fervently wishes it weren't ubiquitous, I hope they DON'T learn from their mistakes. I'd like to see 90% of all computers sold running various distros of Linux, or actually any other OS but Windows. If Microsoft keeps it up that's what's going to hapopen. Don't discourage them!

If it wasn't for their "embrace-extend-extinguish" motto, their "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run", their refusal to interoperate, their reluctance to follow US and EU law I'd agree with you.

But until Gates, Balmer, and their entire Board of Directors and upper management staff are gone I see no prospect whatever of them changing their tune. Microsoft is bad news for anybody not directly associated with them, and bad news for many who are. If they actually were drinking their own koolaid I'd be a bit more sympathetic to them.

Sometimes I really hate slashdot. Its posters claim to keep themselves informed about technical issues, yet they constantly post untruth after untruth, and spread the very same FUD that they despise.

Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading the utter trash about the "dos aint done till lotus won't run" as if it is some sort of truth. It is not. Repeating it just makes you appear to be either a troll, or someone who unfortunately believed the misinformation trolls that post this crap on this site.

And please, spare me the comments about being a M$$$ $hill. I have no affiliation with microsoft, I just really hate it when people spread misinformation on this site, which then gets repeated infinitely as if it were truth. The less FUD coming from, and aimed at microsoft, the better.

is apocryphal, but the strategy that it describes was practiced by Microsoft in the late days of DOS, when Word was second fiddle to WordPerfect and Excel was an also-ran, trailing Lotus' 1-2-3 and Borland's Quattro.

Back in the day, those of us who were using various Business Basics to write custom code relied heavily on a thick reference book called Undocumented DOS, which described the hidden interface to DOS internals that were being used by Microsoft applications, but were not supposed to be used by third party developers because, well, because they weren't officially documented. They were, however, generally faster or in some other way better than the documented routines. The feeling was that if Word and Excel used these, they had to be pretty damn stable.

Microsoft continued this practice with the Windows 3.x APIs. I was doing other things by the end of that era, so I have no personal knowledge of anything after Windows For Workgroups.

While

Dos Ain't Done 'Til Lotus Don't Run

may never have been actually chanted in the halls of Redmond, it is a very good at suggesting the oh so clever mixture of development and marketing strategy that Microsoft has built its edifice on.

Reducing a 90% player to 50% will greatly improve competition and innovation in the market, which is what we all want. Microsoft have been "getting by" based on corruption for years now, with minimal value added to their operating system, browser, office suite... while other systems have had to waste seemingly infinite man-hours supporting Microsoft's deliberately difficult proprietary file formats, file systems and network protocols, all while making time to innovate and advance.

With the waste of time down, and mindshare up, Linux and similar systems in its space will rise to great heights and Microsoft will have to actually make good products to remain relevant. That means we get multiple great operating systems rather than the prolonged battle between highly compromising systems we have now.

First of all I think the 'Vista Capable' suit is ridiculous. Microsoft deserves to win that one, because I am well aware of what was on the shelf on the low to mid range during that time frame. And those machines should of been fine, I had Vista RTM up and running on my P3 1Ghz w/ GeForce 6600. And it ran with Aero, and was certainly 'capable' in classic.

However I can understand Microsoft's dismay at it's performance, for relatively little gain you are incurring tremendous performance hit's across the board. File transfer and gaming come to mind most quickly however. But during it's development cycle I got the impression they really had no idea what they wanted out of Vista, dropping key features over the years. And seemingly concentrating to hard on a 'shiny' UI, that although slick in some respects still feels like a mangled XP GUI, with simply a reworked folder system. And a much lauded search to run feature that should of simply been in XP SP3 to hold users over while something, smaller, better, faster, stronger was being developed.

But in the interests of full disclosure, I have Vista running in a VM... A couple more trips to newegg.com and I might finally install it, DirectX 10 is still exciting to me.

I'm running Vista Ultimate with Aero & dual monitors on an old 875 motherboard, 2.4Ghz Northwood, 1GB ram, Radeon 9600 AGP. No problems whatsoever and performance is fine for work apps (don't play games). I'm thinking of getting a couple of radeon 2400 cards (one AGP one PCI) so I can run three or four monitors.

Meanwhile I run Linux on my wristwatch with 8kb ram, 8x2 text display and two buttons (one for displaying an ascii-art penguin logo and the other for posting this post I am posting at the moment) and I can even run compiz on it (and it runs pretty damn OK), do most of my development (I research operating systems, artificial intelligence and new ways of man-machine comm), heck, I even play minesweeper on it, and- ha! It runs more smoothly than Vista's minesweeper on a Core 2 Quad with 32 GB of ram and SEVEN monitors (but I guess monitor count doesn't add or subtract too much to/from overall system performance, but I might be wrong).

I had a horrible, horrible time with Vista performance, but I use my computer as a development machine. I'm continually bringing up software systems like Oracle and starting and stopping virtual machines. The thing is, I dual booted Linux and never had any problems at all with comparable workloads in Linux. Finally, I figured out that my problem was that the Windows page file was fragmented; it had several thousand fragments, even though the partition it was on was over 50% free.

I was the victim of a number of peculiar things about Windows. First of course is the incomprehensible practice of putting the paging files on user file systems. Then there is the tendency of NTFS to get fragmented, which has greater impact on laptop disks. But I think the corker is that Vista is greedy for memory -- not that needs that memory, but if it thinks you have plenty to spare it grabs as much as it can early on, probably for superfetch or something like it. I figured this out because launching vmware for the first time after a boot seemed to "crash" the system, only it turned out that the system came back in about ten minutes; five if you had readyboost.

It turned out what was going on was that launching vmware doubled the amount of virtual memory the system had allocated, and Vista apparently can't deallocate the memory it had hogged fast enough, resulting in massive swapping. I can only speculate, but I'd guess that under these conditions ntfs allocates the new pagefile segments whereever it can, which of course makes impact of swapping even worse. Later, you can shutdown vmware and restart it with no problem; evidently Vista figures out that you might need that physical memory.

Ultimately, I was able to restore decent performance by defragmenting the system from a rescue disk, and fixing the pagefile so that it was adequately large but could not grow. And now that I know what was going on, I can avoid the problem. However, by now I'd got used to running all my development tasks in virtual machines under Linux, which have the advantage they can be quickly backed up to an external drive. Yes, all the code in source control, but it is a bit nitpicky to get a development system set up just the way I like it. Next time I have a hardware problem on my laptop I'll be able to plug an external drive into a different machine and be ready to go immediately.

In any case, if it was superfetch, this shows the dangers of clever but superficial fixes to underlying problems. I use lots of different, big applications and files. Superfetch at best does very little for me, although it may be great for the user who uses his computer for web browsing and office suites.

OK, a bit more data. Writing about this made me curious as to what was going on, so I rebooted to Vista with Superfetch disabled. Right off the bat, login takes about twice as long, however, once complete the system is completely responsive -- with superfetch on, the desktop shows faster, but the system is sluggish for a minute or so afterwards.

Memory usage is still high -- about 1G of physical RAM in use at idle,so I disable ReadyBoost, which brings physical memory in use down to 850M.

Now I reboot, and launch a task mananger, giving a few minutes for the system reach equillibrium. Once it has, I launch my first vmware machine, and the physical memory shoots up to 1.98 GB, and the system appears crashed. However the disk is working, and there are occasional flashes of screen update. After about five minutes I start to get occasional screen updates which show about 3/4 of physical memory free and about 3/4 of kernel memory paged; CPU use is about 10%, but the system is still unresponsive. A few minutes later the virtual machine is up and everything is responsive, and most of the physical memory is free. I can start and stop the virtual machines with no problem.

Apparently Vista handles a sudden large memory allocation very poorly. The vmware demon doesn't allocate any memory until the first VM is launched, after that it hangs on to a large block of pages. During the initial allocation, it would appear that is about 400M of physical RAM taken up by operating system pages that aren't really needed anytime soon but which Vista feels it needs to swap out to disk. After things stabilize and I quit all running vmware machines, I'm cruising along using under 500MB of physical RAM, 400MB less than before I launched vmware, although there are a lot of page sitting in swap.

So it would appear that the problem isn't the size of Vista's working set, but an amazingly huge virtual memory footprint combined with poor handling of large memory allocations. This would explain, for example, why you supposedly can use Vista on 512 MB; the actual working set of the OS is probably small enough, but getting the bulk of the memory footprint swapped out could take a while. I'd say a typical office apps user probably is safe with 1GB, but somebody like me probably should have 4GB of RAM.

In any case, for my usage patterns, Superfetch only results in superficial performance; ReadyBoost, however, helps a great deal with the fact I don't have enough RAM to launch vmware smoothly; aside from that the improvement is not very noticeable.

I've been using Vista since it came out and have helped to install it on several machines in our office. I can honestly say now that all of those machines I have had to reinstall XP on and with good reason; hardware incompatibilities, software incompatibilities, slowdowns, crashes, freezeups.

I love the new Vistas look and feel but unfortunately it just doesn't perform the way it was promised and they did rush it to market. I think that any company that rusahes a product to market and the consumer ends up paying for it, should be punished for such negligence. If this were a car manufacturer or a drug manufacturer, you would see the same thing. So why should Microsoft be any different?

First for possible bias - I have a business with 6 machines running XP exclusively (2 Fujitsu, 4 Dell) and 2 Macs running Tiger (soon to be Leopard) and XP. Second, I am a physician and in general I hate lawsuits.

If you read the emails, they allowed labeling that had Designed for Windows Vista Basic Logo, Designed for Windows Vista Premium Logo, and then then a Vista Capable logo. Microsoft thought the requirements for the Vista Capable logo is that users "will have a good experience, at least equivalent to Windows XP, when upgraded to Windows Vista."

I think Microsoft will lose on 2 fronts - their technical requirements apparently are having machines that run Windows Vista to perform worst then Windows XP when they indicate their Vista Capable logo should be equivalent. Second, since they were the ones telling the OEMs what the labels were and the requirements for them, then they needed to communicate this to the end user by having a sanctioned straight forward information sheet available at each sales point.

What surprises me most about the emails is how they apparently caved in to Intel when they were aware that they were sacrificing the "Vista Experience" for their future buyers. It is no wonder only 1/3rd or so Window Vista License holders are actually running windows Vista (estimate based on combining netapplications market share for Mac OS X and Windows Vista combined with Steve Job's statement of total Mac OS X installed base and Bill Gates statement of 100,000,000 licenses sold.)

As my handle notes, I work at MS. I worked on Vista security during its development and was frequently at ship room concerning security issues. My focus is not on neat consumer feature and great graphics. I have found that Vista runs well on old hardware that is not really adequate for the new visuals. -- I turn off the Aero interface (which saves a lot of RAM as well), running "Windows Classic" for my UI. I then go to system advanced properties and optimize for performance. The resulting system works quite well. I have an old XP box (Dell GX620, ~ 3 GHz processor with 1 GByte of RAM) that I am running Vista business on. I added a 330 GByte drive and use it as an index server for ~ 150 GBytes of source code that I search. Except when it is syncing its files with the master, when ~ 40 command line processes run synchronization simultaneously, it is reasonably responsive.

I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well on a ~ 3 year old Dell 610 notebook, even when the system is locked into maximum battery life (and minimum performance) mode. It has a ~ 2GHz processor and 2 GBytes of RAM.

Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power. From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's. Search is also very nice and quite useful.

Call me a troll or flamer. But come on, even tho I know you are very possible trying to be funny and serious at the same time. But not everything is fixable with *nix or OSX. People look into upgrading their Windows system to a more secure Windows. Not totally changing platform. So please stop suggesting other OS. I have checked out Linux (and I do like it) but some times I just have to log into Windows to get some stuff done right. No OS is the magic wand.

The best metric is per-system average number of security failures. Not potential vulnerabilities; "Real-World" functionality. Otherwise, you can't hold up the "MS" software ecosystem as a feature of Vista.

Agreed. One of the biggest mistake people do when deciding that something is more secure is to do things the way it is supposed to work. A good example is how packet filtering firewalls allowed any traffic in if they just said "I'm a response to a request you sent". When they designed the firewall technology they clearly did not expect people to do non standard things like that.

After getting seriously hacked they came out with stateful inspection which keeps track of requests going out so they can reasonably tell if an inbound packet is a reply and not a hack.

The point being that crackers, thieves and other criminals cannot be counted on to do things the "right way". By lying, cheating and doing things in a totally unexpected way they find ways around the barriers we put up.

Like digging a tunnel under the wall to get in. You're supposed to try to _walk_ in.

This is where most people fall short when they evaluate how secure something is. They test it the way they are supposed to. Never imagining someone doing it backwards and upside down. So limiting functionality that should never have been turned on by default, with windows there obviously are a lot of things you can do to make it more secure. Giving off a nice warm feeling of how much more secure it is. Then missing obvious buffer overflows and new holes created by the new buggy code.

Windows people usually never realize that Unices have a design philosophy that makes it much easier to lock down. (The concept of one small and simple program that does one thing really well. Then just chain them to get added functionality.) I constantly run into windows techs who think their computer is safe because they unchecked check boxes and so on. (It is no coincidence that OpenBSD can tout the statistics they have. The sound design philosophy on Unix allowed them to accomplish what billion dollar operations cannot.)

Did these cats ever research what hackers/crackers have done and how they got in? Nope. It just feels right to them, so it must be more secure.

"From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's"

Ok, first i was actually about to reply to the GP and defend you.However, I assumed you meant what you said quoted up there, the main reason to upgrade from XP to Vista was security. Or at least by 'earlier OS's' you meant earlier versions of Windows.

And sure, valid point that would be!

But

OS X is definitely not more secure than Vista. Standard Linux consumer distros are not either.

LOL

First off, so mods wont get 'facts' confused with 'troll', i need to post this url at the top:http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-001.mspx [microsoft.com]This will be explained nearly towards the bottom of this post alot better, however is proof your statement is false in a black&white binary world. If you are interested in real world facts where it isnt so clear cut, read on...

An OS that ships with zero services facing the internet (or LAN for that matter, since there is little difference outside of Windows World) is about 100% secure. No version of windows since 3.11 (IE any one with a tcp stack built in) has passed here, and still does.

'But then you add services' you say. Sure, ok. Failure again!

First, we should make the distinction between vender apps and 3rd party apps acting as services. We do this cuz it wouldnt be fair to blame MS for Joe Blows 'super secure internet cursors package' that connects to a remote server plaintext with no auth and executes a list of commands in a file.

Technically all linux services are 3rd party. However, lets bend the rule in windows favor here, and count the 'main' services included in almost all linux distros as not-3rd party (despite the fact they are), such as openssh, apache, bind, etc.

More linux services out of the box have been secure than windows ones, and for the linux ones that have had problems, they have been announced and patched/fixed generally in the time span one sleeps or goes to work in. Windows security bugs are usually swept under the rug and hidden from public view for at least a week, more commonly a month, and in a few rare extreams for years. (See below for proof)So thats 16-24 HOURS to a fix for opensource apps, and whenever next tuesday rolls around for Windows (IE up to 7 days if the hole is major sever and reported minutes or an hour after patch tuesday just hit.)

Now lets hit the OSX part. You are more correct there, but still not really.OSX out of the box is by defiinition FAR more secure than vista. Open OSX services: 0, Open vista services: >1What that means is vista has potential holes that are out there, and wont be reported to us for months (standard MS track record) and wont be fixed till next tuesday (1-7 days), and there is a non 0% chance that disabling that windows services is not possible (no matter how small), which is not the case in OSX.

So, that leaves OSX local exploits compared to vista, and 3rd party introduced ones. In that area I dont know. So i'll give you that just cuz I also dont care to know. easy points, and perfectly plausible to be true.Apple has had its cases of delaying fixes and trying to hide security issues that don't fall in their opensource components.

Hell, up till very recently (~1-2 months ago) there was a flaw in ALL windows TCP stacks that lets an attacker simply execute code (Ok, in fairness, except for windows 2k, which it just crashed instead of ran code) which included vista.This bug has existed for many many years and just recently reported and fixed.

you think the 0day hacking groups havent known about this for many years? no, they do, and use it.Vista was out of the box vulnerable to having remote code executed simply by being on a network.

3 and 2 GHz procs and 1 and 2 Gigs of RAM are minimal HW!? I run Leopard happily on a 1 GHz eMac at home and Tiger on a 450 Mhz G3 tower at work both with 768 MB of RAM. FreeBSD and XP run great on a 750 MHz PC with 512 MB RAM at work as well.

While you may be correct that the best reason to upgrade to Vista is the improved security, that was clearly not how the product was primarily advertised to the general public. People were shown ads with amazing Aero eye-candy, and told that Vista was the way to get it. When purchasing a computer that says "Vista capable," it's a reasonable assumption for a non-technical user (to which those ads were targeted) that buying a "Vista capable" computer will deliver the most prominently advertised feature of Vista.
I'm not saying it's a bulletproof case, because the small print was there, but it's rather self-contradictory to advertise Windows Vista as being easier than ever for novice users, but also expecting same novice users to understand the system requirements of a GUI that is an optional component of an OS.

What about my laptop that's listed as Vista Capable, yet only has 512 MB of RAM, Intel GMA, and 1.7 GHz Celeron. Vista certainly doesn't run well on that, no matter how much tweaking I've tried. Sounds like your machines that work fine with Vista have much better specs than a lot of the Vista Capable hardware being sold. Your systems don't really reflect some of the low end computers being passed off as Vista Capable. One has a processor that's almost twice as fast, with twice as much RAM, and the other has a processor that's about the same speed, yet has 4 times more RAM. Mandriva Linux runs quite smoothly, even with Compiz (3D desktop) for comparison's sake. And that's without any tweaks necessary. If Mandriva can provide all the eye-candy without needing a high end computer, why can't Vista?

You make good points. In my opinion the improved security fully justifies using Vista for a new home PC. I am trying to be objective - I use Linux myself professionally, but I am very glad to have Vista instead of XP on my wife's laptop.

However if you consider a 3GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM to be "an old box", then you have some serious perception problems...:-) An "old box" would be an Athlon 2000 with 512MB PC133 RAM and PATA66. XP runs just fine, thank you.

At the same time I have Vista Home Premium (dual booting with Debian) on a relatively powerful quad-core PC with 3GB RAM, 512MB NVIDIA 8XXX card, SATA, etc (the works), and while it is not slow, it is not snappy either ! I expect most things to be instantaneous on such hardware and they aren't. Sometimes I get the the waiting cursor even for trivial tasks like opening the control panel, with no other apps running ! (well, except Steam, the anti-virus and the other craplets that come with a pre-installed PC:-) That is a disgrace.

Third party software can't secure the kernel, which is why you need an OS change. Other OS won't run most Windows software.

The problem with Vista is that to increase security, the OS had to restrict the ability to so easily add software that malware also was easy to install. This meant going to the Unix model of separating administrator accounts from user accounts by default. This caused problems in many device drivers which had not been properly written to use user level privileges by default. Many device manufactures really don't have smarts to write secure drivers, especially those who are trying to sell in the cost conscious consumer market.

I would judge the responsiveness on the GX620 to be a bit slower than when running XP, but not so significant as to impact my productivity. The other machines I have at work run Server 2K8, which I prefer. I do not run the desktop experience pack, so none of the neat GUI is available.

We are seeing about half of the MSRC issues, and a number of them have lower criticality. In addition, I know what was done in the way of service hardening, the addition of ASLR (which complements the NX work done in XP SP2), the enhancements in exception handling, and the massive fuzzing of parsers for Vista. Unlike XP, it is quite feasible to run Vista as a normal user. I run my kids as normal users on the home systems - they do not have install privledges.

My perspective is more of an enterprise one. Many enterprises adopt alternating releases. I would expect the organizations running W2K to move to Vista and 2K8. The case if more demanding for the move from XP to Vista. It can be made, but it is less compelling.

The problem is that the OS is so badly designed and un-optimized that you can't run it on that kind of hardware. There isn't any good reason why Vista should have been slower than XP really, and fancy FX should have been turned on only on premium hardware. Many other OSes can do it after all. Leopard is doing just fine on a core 2 duo with GMA 950 GFX after all...

The problem is that the OS is so badly designed and un-optimized that you can't run it on that kind of hardware. There isn't any good reason why Vista should have been slower than XP really, and fancy FX should have been turned on only on premium hardware. Many other OSes can do it after all. Leopard is doing just fine on a core 2 duo with GMA 950 GFX after all...

You've actually hit the nail on the head... except if you'd RTFA, you would realize that the suit is exactly because this is what Vista does toda

Microsoft dropped the ball on this one. It is not a Bob, or ME situation, with a strong alternative sitting in the wings. This time, they bet the farm, and now have a lot of crow to eat.

What saddens me is that I want to like Vista, but I can't. My sister loves it, but to get to run it she has now 8x the PC that I do (Athlon64 x2 vs my ancient Socket-A Sempron), and I still crunch her into the ground for performance in many cases. Microsoft has managed to become the victim of it's own success, I believe. They worked on the premise that hardware would progress faster than it did, but people have hit the point of "good enough." More and more I don't see people upgrading their PC's. I used to pick up used machines easily that were just 2-3 years old. Now, this Sempron 2800 is the last one I got this way, and I've had it for years. People just aren't upgrading. Bodes poorly for Vista.

I wonder if AMD can use this in a lawsuit of their own due to anti-competitive practices (On the other hand, it would be burning a bridge with the largest OS manufacturer, but since Intel appears to be getting preferential treatment, there may be something much more sinister below the surface). Not only that, but shouldn't Microsoft's shareholders be kinda ticked? By allowing this to happen, Microsoft opened the door to this lawsuit (something that will not help their investors), while helping out another companies investors, which it would appear was not in Microsoft's investors best interest.

I just read their internal emails and it appears that they changed the drivers required for Vista such that due to new DRM A/V requirements in Vista, most existing drivers were made inoperable and, in many cases, would never be fixed. They then colluded with Intel to say that machines based on the 915 chipset were sufficient to run the OS so that Intel would have good quarterly results.

To summarize, they just don't care about the customer. At no point do the emails indicate them making any decisions based on what's best for their customers. It makes it pretty obvious why Vista has been such a failure so far. They can't even get the service pack right.

I'm not big on the idea of predicting corporate downfalls but you really have to wonder whether a company that makes such incredibly bad decisions is long for this world.

It could be argued that no American, publicly traded corporation really cares about the customer. They care about profits and, to a slightly lesser degree, their stockholders. Now if they could generate revenue and make decent profit by providing an awesome product at a great price, then they probably would (and maybe some corporation do). This would be perceived by the end user as 'caring', but really that is just a by-product. Caring is not in the corporate American equation.

When people are able to run Lord of the rings online in medium graphics level setting with a mid range graphics card, 1 Gb ram and Xp whereas getting almost the same performance with people on vista and high end gear, you can say that the latter os fails in performance.

and dont feed me the 'but those are games' bullshit. for, games and entertainment comprise almost half of the activity on computers, and even for business, only idiots would want to put vista on a client/standalone computer in the office, having the need to pour a few hundred bucks just for being able to run vista so that the computer is going to conduct the same work it did with xp.

on gaming front microsoft tried to push vista with the 'high performance' bullcrap to gamers with dx10. correcting - they FORCED it, and almost noone took it. now they have to oblige with nvidia's needs for putting dx10 capability for xp, because people are just evading not only vista, but high end graphics cards too, because they need dx10 to deliver the latest, but noone wants to take the vista sh@t just because of it.

sorry people. you in microsoft have utterly failed with vista, and you need to go back to drawing board, even, put on your thinking caps and reevaluate your approach to customer and their needs.

Microsoft's REAL error was actually retaining these email messages instead of following their "do-not-save-e-mail directive" and "30-Day E-Mail Destruction Rule", like they did to thwart previous lawsuits [internetnews.com].

My company just bought a dozen new machines. Before buying I checked with our vendor that provides one of our business software products and was told that since we use Samba on our servers, Vista can not work with Samba. So we bought XP and have had not a single issue.

People who rely on using all the features of their hardware (like Jon's Nikon scanner) will not see availability for some time, if ever, depending on the mfg. The built-in drivers never have all the features but do work. For example, I could print with [my] Brother printer and use it as a stand-alone fax. But network setup, scanning, print to fax must come from Brother.

There it is, in plain English. This is what's killing Vista, and Microsoft already saw it a year ago! Ignoring Vista's perceived issues with DRM (which can be circumvented), speed issues & app compatibility (which can be improved with a service pack), and UAC (which has been improved with SP1), many people don't want to throw out even one item of hardware so they could use Vista. And they're right not to do so...

Microsoft got cheap. Instead of paying reluctant vendors to write Vista drivers for older hardware (supposedly this happened for Win95), they ended up turning Vista into a bitter pill. Case in point, I have an HP Photosmart 7350 printer that I bought in 2002. This printer is great because it was one of the last printers to not have HP's customer-friendly "your printer cartridge is too old so I won't print" mechanism. For a few months after Vista's release, HP kept saying that the printer was incompatible with Vista. Suddenly, the printer is compatible with the "HP Deskjet 5550" driver included with Vista. Huh? Of course, HP says that some features are unavailable, but doesn't say which ones...

Even Vista fanbois have to agree that hardware incompatibility/driver issues are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft's Vista Upgrade adviser, while offering great disclosure, doesn't help promote Vista. So that leaves people like me stuck between having perfectly useful hardware with no fully-functioning Vista driver (or no driver at all), and moving to Vista... So I'm sticking with XP.

Agreed. MS made a monumental effort to ensure that Win 3.1 and DOS apps & hardware worked as well as humanly possible on Win95. They knew that successful adoption depended on a painless transition. There was a great story in the Seattle Times back then where an MS employee with a pickup truck drove to Egghead and filled the truck bed [nwsource.com] (scroll down about halfway) with a copy of every shrink-wrapped software product available in the store. He drove back to campus and handed out the boxes to the QA people and said "see if this works". The other great bit about that article is how the descriptions of the work atmosphere (near the bottom) sound like google today. I wonder if anyone would describe MS like that these days?

I'm surprised that they didn't make the same QA effort for Vista. Backwards compatibility has been their ace in the hole for a long time. People put up with the rest because moving from one OS to another wasn't that hard. Most stuff worked almost immediately and if it didn't it got fixed quickly. But the attitude that all vendors would have to write all new drivers is surprising. Granted that the vendors wouldn't have to write as many as MS would, but for an end-of-lifed product there's no financial incentive for the vendor to update it. While MS would seem to have one, given that people who have now-broken hardware are going to be mostly upset with the company that just took their money. Or if someone learns ahead of time that upgrading will disable their hardware they won't want to buy.

many people don't want to throw out even one item of hardware so they could use Vista

Microsoft is being bit by its own successful campaign of getting hardware manufactures to only support Windows with "Designed for Windows" hardware. These WinDevices (WinModems, WinPrinters, WinScanners, etc.) rely on Windows to do the bulk of their processing and if you change the way Windows interfaces with these devices (as is the case with Vista) you need to create brand new drivers from scratch. The problem is that hardware manufactures are not going to invest the time and money to make a discontinued piece of hardware work with Vista when they can sell you a shiny new one.

If Microsoft would have promoted "real" hardware that did not need specialized driver software which is intimately entangled in the internals of Windows, they would not be in this position. Take, for example, a standard Postscript printer: complicated low-level drivers are unnecessary in most operating systems and it just works (to steal a line from the Mac world).

Could you imagine a world where every multi-function device used standard USB communication to interface to the Postscript/PCL printer, SANE/TWAIN scanner, and the built-in fax modem was a standard serial device that used AT command sequences? If Microsoft promoted such standards, this device could not only "just work" with Vista, but also Mac OS (X or otherwise) Linux, OS/2, BeOS... basically everything. The conspiracy theory part of my brain says that MS just can't stand for that, which is why it did not "discourage" hardware manufactures from tying basic functionality to Windows.

But now that it needs to change the internals of Windows, Microsoft's hardware lock-in is coming home to roost.

(BTW, does anyone else think it is monumentally stupid that Vista does not support generic Postscript or PCL printers out of the box and must rely on HP or Adobe for such drivers?)

Please hire me to advise you on your products before releasing.If you give me political amnesty from others within the company, I an give you an honest view of the quality of a product.

Based on these email, it seem that upper management is unaware that some of their employees have had their jobs threatened from people in middle management for getting to 'loud'. Nothing direct, but a lot of implied threats.

I need 120K a year, 100,000 shares, and to work remotely most of the time. I will need to be extracted from the daily 'in the office' routine in order to maintain objectivity.

I work in the strictest confidence, and I assure you know email will be leaked from my office.

Has it ever had a third party driver on it? I've never seen one. I always assumed it was like Windows Media Player which always says "looking for a codec" then "codec not found" - even if it's the most common codec ever which is missing.

Microsoft could fix an awful lot of problems by making Windows Update actually do something useful. I don't know why they don't do it...

I've seen lots of third party driver updates on windows update. Video, modem, network, even HID. Take a 5 year old mainstream computer (like a dell) and put a fresh OS on it. You'll see several "Optional Hardware" updates.

"People who rely on using all the features of their hardware will not see availability [of drivers] for some time, if ever, depending on the mfg. The built-in drivers never have all the features but do work. For example, I could print with my Brother printer and use it as a stand-alone fax. But network setup, scanning, print to fax must come from Brother".

Yes - buying Vista is a really good idea if you want to keep any existing hardware.

"I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.... Apple did not lose their way."

The OS is pretty much a moot point for most people now. Most everyone I know uses a PC to run a browserand email. Sure they may use office or whatever occasionally but the browser and perhaps a email clientcan just about get you anything you need.

FTFA, Steven Sinofsky's first bulleted point in an email to Steve Ballmer:

No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn't start the work until very late in 2006. This led to the lack of availability. For example my home multi-function printer did not have drivers until 2/2 and even pulled their 1/30 drivers and re-released them (Brother).

To all the Microsoft apologists out there--this is your Waterloo. Here we have a concrete example of how Microsoft decided to do one of their corporate buddies a huge favor--letting them meet their f'n quarterly numbers. So, Microsoft chose to help one of their rich pals over every single one of their users. That should tell you who they value. And the common perception that Vista is a piece of crap? Confirmed internally! This is just despicable.

What I've always found funny about Vista is that it had poor compatibility with existing Windows applications, and abysmal hardware support. You know, the two things that (rightly) prevent people from using another OS instead of Windows...

Early 2006: Microsoft got cozy with HP to make sure that HP invested in a better graphical experience for Vista. Intel had to make its quarterly earnings and convinced Microsoft to call their chipset "capable" even though it couldn't meat the graphic standards. Microsoft had explicitly told HP that they wouldn't do this, but they, led by some dude named Will Poole, decided to bone HP to make Intel (specifically some SVP chick named Renee-most likely Renee James) happy. Then MS discussed how they are going to try to play it off to intel with some fancy obfuscating letter. They got this guy at MS named Jim Allchin to sign off on it, which he reluctantly did, but chastised them for pulling this crap. Some dude named Mike Ybarra pointed out to Jim that they are boning HP and their customers just to get cuddly wuddly with Intel and Jim seemed to agree, but figured the wheels were in motion and could not be stopped. Mike specifically said, "We are caving to Intel... We are really burning HP... We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience..."

Fast forward a year later and some board member John Shirley sends some borderline literate guy named Steve Balmer an email about how his shit won't work with Vista and that some of the stuff may never get Vista drivers. They surmise that vendors didn't trust them to deliver Vista (gee, wonder why) so they didn't make drivers. Balmer sends an email to some guy named Steven Sinofsky asking about the driver situation. Sinofsky agrees that vendors didn't expect them to ship and also says that changes to Vista made it so XP drivers wouldn't work, he questions how smart it was to call the Intel chipset "capable" when it wasn't, and says that they need to be clearer with the industry. Then some exec named Mike Nash points out how his company boned him because he bought a $2100 "Vista capable" laptop that is only good as an email machine.

In the end, some exec John Kalman says that lowering their standard for Intel screwed them and they won't make such a stupid mistake with Windows 7.

In short, Will Poole is a weasel who is just trying to make some Intel chick happy. Mike Ybarra is too thoughtful and has too much foresight to work at MS. Jim Allchin needs to go with his gut and remind Will Poole which side of the desk he sits on. Steve Ballmer is missing some keys on his keyboard. Steven Sinofsky and Kohn Kalman have 20/20 hindsight. HP deserves to kick somebody's ass at MS. They should probably kick Intel's ass too, but MS is too busy licking it.

MSFT would likely have sold the same number of licenses either way. Keeping intel happy by allowing them to sell less expensive parts as compatible was not directly profit driven - it was keeping a partner happy.

Ergo, this decision did not directly line their pockets. meaning it wasnt exactly thier profit.

Are they going to reimburse me for buying extra RAM for my daughter's new Toshiba laptop that had 512 MB of RAM with Vista, officially offered for sale at a store that way, but with 64 MB of it reserved for video RAM, leaving the system with a whopping 448 MB of RAM? And it takes about 10 minutes to start up because the HDD is running virtually nonstop, thrashing as it pages in the minimal amount of stuff needed? And opening a web page or a simple program takes almost as long, for the same reason?

Someone decided that was a valid, acceptable configuration for a Windows Vista machine.

Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?

What does this option do that turning off Aero (or going all the way back to 'Windows Classic' theme) doesn't do? Does this work on desktops, or is it a laptop-only thing where the other option is "Optimize for battery life"? Sorry, I don't have a Vista machine here or else I'd check for myself. Really, I want to know. I remember a tab like that in XP but all it did was turn off visual effects.

"Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?"

There are four radio buttons:- Let Windows choose what's best for my computer (default)- Adjust for best appearance- Adjust for best performance- Custom

The first radio button is selected by default, and at least on my system, is the same as "Adjust for best appearance", which is what I would expect to be selected by default. This might be different on lower powered machines.

The "Custom" option lets you enable and disable about two dozen fine grained options such as "Slide taskbar buttons", or "Smooth edges of screen fonts".

That was always the gripe I had with integrated graphics chipsets. IGV take away the system memory and the OEM's "innocently" forget to do the subtraction when quoting the actual system memory in their marketing material.

Dismay, when contacted, said she was not even in the country when the photo in question was taken. Vista could not be reached for comment, but her publisher insisted that all struggling new talent has photos in the closet that invariably surface when they become popular. When asked, the man-on-the-street responded with a shrug and said "Good thing neither of them has dentures - someone could have lost a labia!"

Are they going to reimburse me for buying extra RAM for my daughter's new Toshiba laptop that had 512 MB of RAM with Vista, officially offered for sale at a store that way, but with 64 MB of it reserved for video RAM, leaving the system with a whopping 448 MB of RAM? And it takes about 10 minutes to start up because the HDD is running virtually nonstop, thrashing as it pages in the minimal amount of stuff needed? And opening a web page or a simple program takes almost as long, for the same reason?...

Nearly all OEMs still allow you to upgrade to XP, but you have to ask. They won't tell you about it, you have to be active about it. But then, those that make active decisions about hardware and systems rarely end up with Windows, let alone MS Vista. Lots of people are getting burned by leaving too much of the decision up to the sales staff.

But even if you can't upgrade to XP, unless she's playing heavily some games that don't run in WINE or surfing a lot of WMV porn, then she'll get more mileage out of a linux distro like CentOS [centos.org] and Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]. Try it. If they suck, then you can crow about it. If they save you time and effort, then it was time well spent and you can go around to any MS Vista users and rub their noses in it. Nowadays even Photoshop runs in WINE.

If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows.

That would have been you, or your daughter since nobody forced you to buy it. Hell, 512MB on a laptop with XP is barely adequate so it should be no surprise that it's barely adequate for Vista.

Yeah, like the average shopper at Best Buy is supposed to know this. They don't. And the stickers were supposed to relieve the shopper of the uncertainty regarding the hardware's ability to run the latest Windows operating system. Microsoft said, "trust us," and the shoppers who did got fucked. But that's no surprise, either. It's the Microsoft way.

Sucks to be them, but I still don't see where they deserve my sympathy. Trusting Microsoft is a sign of either wilful ignorance or terminal negligence. There's nothing wrong with choosing Vista if you decide after consideration that it's the OS that meets your needs best, but if you buy a computer without doing the research first, you deserve everything you get.

From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."

It really depends on what you're doing. Personally, I like to have 2GB or more, especially if we're talking Vista, but 512MB is XP is fine for everything but serious gaming or trying to burn a DVD while multitasking.

--- quote ---From what I have seen, for 98% of things in XP 512MB is enough on a properly configured system. I'd say for XP that 128mb is "barely adequate."--- end quote ---Unless of course you like to run Photoshop, or you have a need to run Word and Dreamweaver at (gasp!) the same time, or you like to play mp3s while working or a number of other situations.

Novice users - you might say - are not going to be running Photoshop, but I will be that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once,

(1) You point out that "novice users" (and that would be the vast majority of computer users), are not going to run Photoshop. Yet you mention that 512MB ain't enough to run it. Why did you even mention it then?

(2) You say "or you like to play mp3s while working", implying that this would overload a 512MB XP machine. I have mplayer.exe running with a movie paused -- 17MB of RAM used. 17MB more is going to break the XP camel's back?

(3) "or a number of other situation". You mean like running AutoCAD, a continuous system benchmark, and playing WoW...while downloading pr0n? Man, I see novices doing that all the time.

(4) "but I will be [sic] that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once". Well, in my experience novices tend to have a grand total of one program open at once, and if you try to leave a second one open they will close it, sometimes even when you have carefully minimized it. Many developers are this way as well -- wanting to squeeze an extra 50msec out of that recompile. Oh, and that one program is almost for sure 99% most likely you-can-bet maximized.

Real world situation #1: upgrading the dreaded mother-in-law computer to XP involving a machine with 64MB of RAM. Yup, one-eighth of what you are whining about. EVERYTHING I re-installed worked. MS O2k, CompuServe 2000, graphics editors, alternate browser, etc. Yes, everything ran slowly. Yes, it was slow to boot up (but not as slow as 512MB Vista machines). And when told how cheap RAM was, the m-i-l rushed out and bought 256MB.

Real world situation #2: my wife upgrading her computer while I was away. It went from 98 to XP Pro, with 320MB of RAM. The thing ran hundreds of games and everything else. Nobody ever thought it was slow. I used it myself for some things for a time. It was only replaced a year ago, and died of dust overload, if anything.

Insightful? If the box says it will run Vista (or if the Vista box says it will run on 512mb) it should run Vista with 512mb or it's a classic bait and switch. And you shouldn't have to reconfigure anything or add any hardware, it should WORK. Speaking of which, my box at home has 512mb and it runs XP fine. Most of the time anyway; sometimes it has trouble booting, bluescreening and rebooting itself repeatedly.

I have better uses for my money [slashdot.org] (like paying my eye doctor, Dr. Odin) than buying yet more memory for a computer that worked fine with 98 and works fine with mandriva/KDE. If I were the guy who typed the GP post I'd be pissed too.

Did thieves just take over all corporations this century, or was I just not paying attention the first half century of my life? When did lying become acceptable?

Microsoft and its employees should stop making excuses for their piss-poor crapware and actually produce a quality product instead of the bloated buggy crap they shovel out the door these days. If I bought whole computers instead of building them from spare parts I'd buy a mac.

Before I took the plunge and wiped all MS off of my laptop in favor Ubuntu (and I couldn't be happier I might add), I had the same issue of not being able to find the XP drivers for my Acer 5620 laptop that I bought from best buy. I finally, after about a week of searching, hit up on the European site [acer-euro.com] which had everything I needed. Also, when I first bought the computer, the BIOS it had didn't have the ability to emulate IDE or whatever on the SATA drives so XP couldn't even see them to do the install. A

It attempted to download and run something on the computer I'm using. There's an "extra anonymous modifier" om the post so it's a registered slashdot user.

I have nobody in my "foes" list but if this guy had not posted anonymously, he'd have been the first. Is there any way to unmask these asshats? Maybe the program he was trying to plant was benign, but I really doubt it. At any rate, that is the last link I click from an A/C post.

To be fair, the horrible grammar/spelling is probably because Ballmer is replying to emails on the road from a smartphone. I have found most managers reply with one liners like this when punching messages onto tiny smartphone keys.